North Korea blasts ‘human rights racket’ after damning UN report

“The politicization of human rights and utility of double requirements should be rejected at worldwide organizations together with the UN Human Rights Council,” wrote Rodong Sinmun on Tuesday. Rodong Sinmun is the official newspaper of the Central Committee of the Staff’ Celebration of Korea.

The North Korean criticism comes days after the publication of a report submitted by a UN particular rapporteur to the worldwide group’s Human Rights Council.

“The (North Korean) State’s intensive penitentiary system and extreme restrictions on all types of free expression, motion and entry to data, added to the poor entry to fundamental wants, particularly meals, proceed to nurture concern of the State and depart folks on the mercy of unaccountable public officers,” the particular rapporteur concluded.

North Korea denied the particular rapporteur, an Argentinian named Tomás Ojea Quintana, entry to the nation.

As a substitute, Quintana relied on interviews with civil society teams and authorities officers in South Korea and Japan, in addition to defectors who fled North Korea in 2016 and 2017.

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Fewer defectors in 2017

Quintana famous that the variety of defectors fleeing North Korea dropped 20% in 2017 in comparison with 2016, which “may mirror tighter controls of the border between the Democratic Individuals’s Republic of Korea and China.

A UN evaluation in March 2017 concluded that 41% of North Korea’s inhabitants is undernourished.

The particular rapporteur famous that a lot of the inhabitants depends on black market commerce to supply different sources of meals.

“The dilemma that the inhabitants faces is to search out methods to fulfill fundamental day by day wants whereas circumventing the formal prohibition and punishment of personal initiative by a State that fails to supply for these wants,” Quintana wrote.

He known as on North Korea to facilitate household reunions for some 59,000 largely aged folks, reduce off from kin on reverse sides of the Demilitarized Zone for the reason that Korean Warfare, and urged China to cease sending defectors again throughout the border to North Korea, the place they face the specter of torture and imprisonment.

Requires entry to detained US and South Korean residents

Quintana additionally requested consular entry for 3 US residents and 6 South Koreans at present imprisoned in North Korea.

And he urged Pyongyang to promptly examine “unresolved circumstances of abductions involving residents of Japan, the Republic of Korea and different States.”

There are 17 formally acknowledged circumstances of abduction of Japanese nationals, along with 883 different circumstances the place abduction by North Korea can’t be dominated out. At the least 516 South Korean residents kidnapped by North Korea additionally stay unaccounted for.

In response, the North Korean newspaper Rodong Sinmun argued “human rights can by no means come true so long as the imperialists stay on the earth.”